Industry in this country has been demanding an ideal gas and impurity separator that can purify compressed air to provide a high velocity air stream with near zero impurity. In the past, various gas and liquid separators have been invented and used. Some of those devices utilize centrifugal force of the high velocity compressed air and the gravitational force of the condensed liquid droplets to achieve the necessary gas and liquid separation, such as the invention disclosed and claimed in the patent issued to Rodney A. William on July 23, 1974, U.S. Pat. No. 3,824,765. William's invention claimed efficient and complete separation of liquid from gas by subjecting the gas stream to centrifugal action in first one direction and then in a second opposite direction. Once gas stream traveled through the second opposite passageway, it exerted a greater certrifugal force on the entrained liquid to obtain optimum separation by having the condensed liquid collected on the built-in multiple screens and drained downwardly gravitly into a quiescent zone. The liquid in the quiescent zone was free from the action of the gas stream and can freely flow into a settling tank to be drained off at a later time. Although William's patent provided an improved and more efficient gas and liquid separation over other separators, such as the one disclosed and claimed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,755,886, issued to J. A. Campbell on July 24, 1956, it only separated liquid from the gas. Impurities such as dust, fibre that are commonly found in the compressed air can not be separated by the William's device and the treated air stream coming out from such separator still contains those unwanted particles that may impair the final performance of the machine.
There are other types of separators utilizing a air filter to filter out liquid and solid contaminants from the forced air, such as the invention disclosed and claimed in the patent issued to Virgil I. Frantz on Sept. 24, 1968, U.S. Pat. No. 3,402,529 Frantz's invention provided a cyclone air filter for forced air filtered downwardly through a finned helical conduit making use of both centrifugal force and condensation of liquid in separating liquid contaminants from the air. This device should have possibly filtered out all the impure fine particles in the compressed air, but the experience shows that the filter is often clogged up with the impurities and the condensed liquid trapped inside the filter can be easily flashed out by the returning upward moving air stream that is to be released from the outlet port built opposing to the inlet port in the upper part of the housing unit. Users of this device not only can not get pure forced air, but also are required to replace the filter constantly which results high maintenance cost.
The present invention related in general to an air separator for removing moisture, dust, oil, and any other foreign matter from compressed air.
An object of this invention is to provide an air separator in which the high velocity air stream containing various impurities is passed through a mesh coalescer which results coalescence of fine liquid particles into large droplets.
Another object of the invention is to furnish a helical conduit to allow the condensed liquid droplets flow by gravity into a wind-up protective zone in the lower portion of the separator, and the liquid then can freely flows downwardly into the liquid storage trap to be drained off through a drain valve secured bottom of the separator unit.
A further object of the invention is to provide a wind-up protector that is made of multiple vertically standing 2-3 mm diameter in opening triangular tubings of high molecular weight polymer prefabricated together as one single unit. The wind-up protector has centrally inverted shape to provide room for the swirling up high velocity air to travel upwardly and thus prevent disturbance of any condensed liquid both inside the wind-up protector and in the liquid storage trap.
A further object of the invention is to provide an air filter to filter out liquid and solid contaminants from forced air travelling upwardly on the way out from the separator.
A further object of the invention is to provide an air filter assembly that can easily replace and dispose of an air filter having reached the saturation point.